the Office is Sacred and In Good Hands

everyone in government is a self interested buffoon

libs be like :same-picture:

:data-laughing: exactly what i thought when i saw the second post :tito-laugh:

im not going to pretend US culture was ever anything so high as to be able to experience 'decline'. film sucks, art sucks, mostly because capitalism fucks it up but some of it don't work in ideal conditions either

we've never had communism. why do we need to fetishise art from a capitalist past with the same conditions making it awful that make it awful today?

directly compare 2019 with 1994.

this is not close to extensive, these are films millions of people watched and some millions quite liked or thought was decent.

i don't think i've ever been accused of neoliberalism for watching way too many movies before but that's a good bit

i am begging you to test this hypothesis and going and watching every release from [any period in the past] not just the ones which are beloved enough to warrant rereleases and streaming contracts. film is a graveyard of creative bankruptcy and low effort exploitation.

even the USSR has a backcatalogue of cheap imitation and trendfollowing bullshit

a culture notably devoid of market forces circa 1992.

don't get me wrong most of what comes out now is still horseshit, it just used to be too. collective memory separates the chaff and gives people an incomplete picture of whatever era they're nostalgia-ing

it was different before! it was more artistic 20 years ago!

:thonk: which is what they were saying 20 years ago. and 20 years before that. Snobs have been complaining about lowbrow pushing out highbrow since like, the advent of the talky. And then in a couple decades it gets reappraised as 'oh that schlock we were hating on is actually Super Art and the shit coming out now doesn't compare'.

But they can never talk about why this is, even though its obvious and has been the same fucking process the entire time. Hollywood has always always always been about getting asses in seats, never artistic achievement. You want to see what artist-lead film is go back in time to the fucking Soviet Union.

God these nostalgia hogs make me sick

id prefer a good actor with a strange affect to an authentic-but-awful american tbh.

the american? actors in that movie were soooo bad. it hurt to watch.

the dam part is perfectly feasible.

gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin ... Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:

then there's the fact we'll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause---the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology

but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they're gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it'd be a shame to not build great monuments down here

it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry

NAWAPA but 20x as expensive and destructive. I love it.